Labels embodied in a number of tracks may be written to optical discs. The label is written to the disc one track at a time. In order to provide for transition between tracks, a host that generates the track data may be employed to estimate the delays incurred during the transition and format the data appropriately so that the data is available when the optical disc drive is ready to fire a particular track. However, the nature of asynchronous events within a segmented labeling system result in non-deterministic processing delays. Consequently, depending upon the drive processor duty cycle, the drive may take more or less real time to perform any operation. Also, other factors may result in undue delays in writing individual ones of the tracks due to reliance on the host to format the data to account for transitions between tracks.